Robert O. Self is Associate Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of History at Brown University. His research focuses on urban history, American politics, and the post-1945 United States. His first book, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland, won four professional prizes, including the James A. Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians. He is currently finishing a second book, to be published in 2012, entitled We Are Family: The Politics of Gender and Sexuality at the End of the American Century. He teaches courses on the postwar United States; the history of political movements; the history of gender, sex, and the family; and urban history.